


Backwards in sevens

by pr_scatterbrain



Category: Bandom, Beirut, Indie Music RPF, Music RPF, Panic At The Disco
Genre: Alternate Universe, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-23
Updated: 2012-08-23
Packaged: 2017-11-12 17:22:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,023
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/493776
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pr_scatterbrain/pseuds/pr_scatterbrain
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The one where Spencer grows up in Santa Fe with the Condon family…</p>
            </blockquote>





	Backwards in sevens

**Author's Note:**

> n.b. Zach Condon’s older brother is Ryan Condon and his younger brother is Ross Condon, which may be confusing given Ryan Ross is also in this (and a separate non-related person, for those new to bandom). I have tried my best to make it clear who is who at all times, but if there is any confusion, please let me know and I’ll do my best to clarify any ambiguity.

 

 

 

Growing up, Santa Fe feels like someone else’s home town. Not Zach’s.

Outside the school library he waits for his brother Ross to pick him up. In the air he can hear the school band practicing. Over and over they play one section, torturing it too and fro. They never quite seem to get it right. The timings always a millisecond off. The flutes interrupting the saxophones, the tuba’s playing over the trumpets.

Loosening his school tie with one hand, Zach checks his wrist watch. Ross is running late again.

 

 

Zach lives inside his head. Ross does too. Ryan doesn’t though. He is loud and sometimes there is a degree sharpness in his voice that is mirrored in his eyes. They are brothers. They do not necessarily understand each other all the time. That is no ones fault, not even their own.

 

 

On Friday night, Zach stays up late in his room making formulas out of cords and key changes. When he finally falls asleep, he sleeps until late the next day. When he wakes Ryan is gone and Ross is outside in the garden hanging up washing with their mother. All the windows in the house are open. When Zach goes to make himself something to eat, he finds Spencer is leaning against the kitchen counter reading a week old newspaper from the recycling bin. His fingers are stained black with ink. Zach mumbles a hello.

“There’s no bread,” Spencer tells him absently.

Zach doesn’t know if there ever is. In spring, Ryan turned thirteen and now he eats like it is a vocation. Opening the fridge, Zach finds leftovers from the night before. With a fork he picks at the wilted salad and eats vinegar soaked cherry tomatoes and radishes.

“They say the ice caps are melting,” Spencer comments, distantly. “The ocean keeps rising each year.”

“Who says that?”

“The editor of the _Santa Fe New Mexican_.”

Zach looks over Spencer’s shoulder at the paper. “My homeroom teacher doesn’t believe in global warming.”

That isn’t strictly true – but Zach tells Spencer that she calls herself a sceptic. The weight of the word feels more interesting the truth. But the truth is often a very bland thing, Zach thinks as he watches Spencer carefully tears the article out, folds it, and slips it into his back pocket.

Spencer has been hanging around for as long as Zach can remember. But outside of sounds and notes and muscle memory, his memory isn’t that good.  

In a round about way he knows that Spencer is Ross’s friend from school. When Ross was a sophomore, he tutored Spencer in French. Despite the age gap they get on well enough. Before Ross gradated Spencer used to save a seat for him when they had lunch period together and sometimes Ross lends Spencer books about the galaxy and doesn’t mind when Spencer takes months to return them.

Spencer is Ryan’s friend too.

They’re both drummers in the middle school band and they both get caught smoking weed a month after Zach drops out.

 

 

Zach goes to Europe. He takes Ross with him. He –

 

 

When he comes back he enrols in a local community college but still ends up going to house parties with the same people he went to high school with. It’s a small town really. The parties are all more or less identical whether Zach’s in high school or college.

Ryan is fourteen. The centre of the largest gathering of people is always him.

Some things come so easily to some people. Others don’t.

After drinking too much, Zach finds Spencer smoking weed out on the porch. “Should you be doing that?”

Spencer shakes his head. “No.”

What Zach knows is all second hand, but Ryan has always known too much about everyone and Spencer’s been close with Ross and Ross has always been honest where Zach is a liar, so Zach is pretty certain Spencer’s shouldn’t be taking drugs. Not when he needs to takes others to keep him in one piece.

Holding out a hand, Spencer hands the joint over. Sitting side by side, Zach smokes what’s left of it.

“This time a month ago I was in a bar in Berlin,” Zach tells him, feeling stupid and romantic. “It was underground and whenever the singer paused between songs you could hear cars driving on top of us.”

Spencer smiles, leaning his shoulders against Zach's. “This time last month I was right here.”

Zach thinks about that. “But I wasn’t here with you.”

“No, you weren’t.”

 

 

In the morning Zach is hung over and can’t remember much from the night before.

 

 

A pattern forms.

(There are things Zach is used to, things that have sharp edges made dull though time and made familiar by repetition. Zach is not clever, but his older brother is. Zach isn’t worthy of things like regard but his younger brother disagrees. The two of them give him their words and their friends and look him in the eye and Zach doesn’t deserve any of it but it take everything they give him because he can).

Then another overlaps it.

 

 

Zach spends most of his time in his bedrooms.

But that isn’t where he is. 

 

 

When Zach leaves Santa Fe for good, it is his music that carries him out. Head first. Not the other way round. No, not just yet.

 

 

Half a dozen years later, Zach washes up at Spencer’s new place in LA after a too long tour promoting his last album. The place is old, but Spencer is new to it. He doesn’t know how to use the clothes washing machine. Zach wouldn’t know either. It’s all buttons and dials to him. It belongs to Spencer’s roommate. Spencer’s roommate has money.

“But no sense,” Spencer comments, his voice quiet. He sounds a little fond to Zach’s ears. But it’s been a while. Zach could be wrong.

Zach watches him read the instruction manual. The pages are crisp, unread, but only by the virtue of being new. Occasionally Spencer with flip a few pages back and forth. It takes him a while, but eventually he figures it out.

The machine is loud in the quiet apartment.  Even when Spencer shuts the laundry room door, Zach can hear it as he tries to sleep on the fold out couch. He’s still awake in the early hours of the morning when Spencer’s roommate stumbling home; swearing colourfully when he drops his keys and then steps on them. In the darkness Zach watches him, watches the show he unconsciously performs.

Zach closes his eyes. He’s seen enough.

 

 

In the morning Spencer goes running.

“No one walks in LA. Everyone drives everywhere,” Ross says when Zach calls to check in. “You have to get your exercise somewhere.”

Ross still talks to Spencer pretty regularly. They email, Ross says quietly like it means something. But the two of them were always close so perhaps it does.  He’s the only one still living back home. Zach doesn’t understand that. Even Spencer left.

Spencer’s moved twice now. Once to NYC with Ryan and once to LA with his new band.

“I still don’t understand how Spencer’s in a girl band,” Zach says.

 “They employ him.”

“So he’s a contract drummer?”

“Pretty much,” Ross says. “At least until the girl drummer recovers from her spinal operation.”

Zach thinks about. “Do they give him dental benefits?”

Ross laughs.

 

 

When Spencer gets back, it’s still early and the roommate is asleep.

His name is Ryan Ross. When Spencer tells Zach, Zach asks him to repeat himself.

“I know,” Spencer says. “It fucks with me too. But that’s really his name.”

Ryan occasionally writes songs, sometimes makes art, and once was in a reasonably successful indie band. They’re now on hiatus and have been for the last three year. He cannot keep a roommate to save his life. Apart from Spencer. Spencer seems to stick. So far, at least.

When Ryan appears around noon he is offhand and overfamiliar at the same time. It confuses Zach. He is too used to Spencer who might not say much, but means what he says. Sitting in the kitchen, Ryan talks about people that they apparently both know and what he thought of some band’s EP that Zach hasn’t had the chance to listen too yet.

“Zach’s been on tour,” Spencer explains when Ryan gets a pinched look on his face. “He hasn’t even heard Total Slacker’s latest stuff.”

That is a lie, but Zach is grateful for it. He has never been fluent in scene talk like Ryan obviously is. Zach likes what he likes. It’s rather simple, but it’s true. His focus is narrow compared to Ryan. 

 

 

At night, Zach ends up standing with Ryan at the bar while The Like are onstage. 

With nothing to say, he buys a beer just to have something to hold in his hands as Ryan talks about doing back up vocals for M38.

After The Like finish their set, there is an after party. The lead singer (and  Ryan’s on and off girlfriend), Z, convince them to stay and attend. Zach thinks he’s met her before. She acts like they have. When she brings up that time in Paris at that gallery, the one under the railway, he is caught of guard and feels guilty for not remembering her.

When he tells Spencer, Spencer laughs but won’t tell him what’s funny.

 

 

At the end of the night he and Spencer get a lift back with two of the girls from the band. Spencer introduced Zach to them at the start of the night, but Zach can’t remember their names now. It’s rude, he knows. But he is often rude. When they reach Spencer’s place, they kiss Spencer goodbye and Zach too. They are wearing matching matte lipstick, wrinkled sheath dresses, and patent leather heels. When they lean close to kiss him, he discovers they smell like hairspray. Bathed in their cars hi beam lights and with a few drinks in his blood, Zach finds it surreal; all the girls in the band perform in a uniform.

“Where’s your uniform, Smith?” Zach asks Spencer, tugging the wrinkled tails of his white button down shirt. “If I didn’t know better I’d think you were a bus boy.”

Spencer shakes his head. “I don’t get one. I’m just a substitute.”

Zach doesn’t like the sound of that. But he smiles anyway because Spencer intended it to be humorous.

 

 

For a while Zach lived in a share apartment in NYC. He didn’t live there much. During his last tour, a friend of Spencer’s ended up taking the room over. Now all of Zach’s earthly belongings are split unevenly between the backpack in Spencer’s laundry and a couple of boxes in a friend of a friends’ garage in Williamsburg.

Zach’s never had much; never needed much. That hasn’t ever changed.

Six hours sleep doesn’t change it either.

More exhausted than hung over, he and Spencer get breakfast at a local café a block and a half away from the apartment.

“What are you doing here?” Spencer asks, as Zach knew he eventually would.

Zach shrugs. In Berlin he had almost been hit by a car. He doesn’t remember walking onto the road; just the sound of horns blaring and the feel of a stranger’s hand pulling out of harms way him by the collar.  He could have been hurt. He could have died. He should have finished the tour then.

He should have done a lot of things differently. But instead he’s sitting opposite Spencer, with a plate of egg whites and spinach in front of him.

He wants to turn Spencer’s question around, wants to ask what he is doing here in this place.

The last Zach heard, Spencer had been doing some stuff with some guys from SVA. It had been pretty good too. Lo-fi with some great hooks.

Spencer shouldn’t be in LA.

LA is odd in its complete artificiality. Zach doesn’t quite understand how Spencer ended up in a place like it. The kid he remembers used to sleep on their roof with his youngest brother; the walls of his bedroom too confining and the lure of an open door too great.  Zach remembers hearing them talking when he’d stumble out of his room in the middle of the night. They were such funny kids. All Ryan wanted was a dare and all Spencer needed was someone to look the other way; it was no wonder they got into so much trouble together.  

 

 

The Like have a solid following. The kids that come to their gigs are well dressed and well connected. The girls in the band are well dressed and well connected too. The actually drummer comes out and watches the next gig. Her name is Tennessee and the lace dress she is wearing is loose on her frame. It swings around her calves and she keeps having to push the sleeves up her arms.

Six months ago she hurt her back while repotting an avocado tree.

Even after surgery and rehab, she moves stiffly and carefully in a way that doesn’t seem fair for someone so young.

“When I was fourteen I broke my wrist,” he tells her. “That’s why I can’t play guitar.”

She takes a sip of her beer. “Look how well you turned out despite it.”

 

 

Zach used to be a liar. Now he can’t open his mouth without telling the truth.

 

 

There are presumptions and there is Zach following Spencer into his room when they get back from the venue. In the low light of a single bedside lamp he watches Spencer strip down to his boxers. Spencer is made up of lean lines and chorded muscle. His shoulders are broad and his hips are narrow like a swimmer.

When Spencer turns off the lamp and crawls into bed, Zach lays beside him and kisses him.

There should be something terrifying about how easily Spencer allows Zach to press close, to push him on his back and roll between his legs. Maybe there is. The darkness mutes everything apart from the greedy way Zach touches his mouth to Spencers, and the shallow rasp of Spencer’s breathing.

At one point Spencer gasps. At another, he twists his fingers into Zach’s hair and holds Zach where he wants him. When he does, Zach comes almost immediately. Flushed and a little embarrassed, Zach buries his face into Spencer’s chest and tries not to squirm while Spencer ruts against him.

 

 

Sex is overwhelming, sometimes.  

 

 

A friend from back home calls. Another from NYC leaves a message. Zach goes to more LA parties with Spencer roommate and Spencer’s employers. Spencer often leaves early. When he goes, Zach doesn’t know anyone. But there are still people who talk to him. After half a dozen shots, there isn’t a real difference between the two categories.

For a time Zach sleeps days away, half hung over, half exhausted before doing it all over again. Rinse, repeat.

He wakes when Spencer sits down beside him and turns on the television set.

Together they watch the news silently. Spencer’s hands are clenched into fists. There is an echo that rattles deep inside Zach’s chest. He thinks about reaching out to touch Spencer. He thinks about how Spencer used to have newspaper ink staining his fingertips and how Zach noticed.  

“You make a good drummer,” Zach says eventually.

Spencer turns off the news and goes into the kitchen.

 

 

Ross calls Spencer. From his position on the couch, Zach listens to Spencer’s side of the conversation and pretends not to understand what they’re arguing about.

 

 

More people call Zach. He lets it go to voice mail.

 

 

More people call Zach. He answers.

 

 

“I spoke to Owen,” Zach tells Spencer.

Spencer hasn’t meet Owen Pallett, but he nods.

“He wants me to come to Montreal and record a string arrangement with him.”

“Oh,” Spencer says. Then, after a beat, “When are you leaving?”

 

 

Zach’s older brother taught Spencer French, and his younger brother managed to get Spencer to move to NYC with him.

Zach doesn’t know how some things come so easily to some people when they don’t to him.

 

 

One of Spencer’s friends offers to drive Zach to the airport. Spencer goes for a run while Zach folds his clothes and repacks them into his backpack. When he finishes he goes and sits on the front steps of the apartment building.

While waiting for Spencer to return, Zach thinks about telling Spencer that he’s going to come back, but Zach isn’t sure if he will. He isn’t sure where he’ll end up. He’s never been sure. Spencer could join his band and come with him. It would be lie to say Zach hasn’t thought of asking Spencer that. But Zach knows better than to ask for one thing when he really wants to ask for something else instead. Not when he can’t promise to come back.

With his eyes fixed on the road, Zach tries to think of something else he could say instead.  He hasn’t come up with anything worthwhile by the time Spencer appears in the distance.

 

 

Zach lives in his head. Spencer can’t.

 

 

When Zach’s ride appears, Spencer carries Zach’s backpack to the car. He isn’t coming to the airport. The Like are doing some live web performance thing for _Nylon_ and he has to head over to Z’s place to play tambourine for them.

“Don’t be a stranger,” Spencer tells him.

Zach nods. “Yeah. Okay.”

Spencer smiles a little, like he knows better.

Zach can’t really look at him. “Don’t go joining any surf bands while I’m gone.”

“I’ll try.”

And because Zach wants too, wants probably more than he should, Zach kisses him. With one hand, Spencer touches Zach’s wrist. But Spencer lets go when Zach breaks away to breath.

“Hey,” Spencer says, and Zach thinks about all those lies he used to tell and how he can’t tell any of them now. “Take care of yourself.”

Zach makes himself nod. “You too.”

 

 

Maybe Zach can’t promise to come back, but he wants too.

 

 

 

 


End file.
